Dec 14, 2023
Life Drawing Exhibition January 2024
Open to the public from Monday 22nd January 2024
Private View on Friday 26th January 6.30pm
Everyone Welcome
“We have work on show that learners found interesting to contribute
because it marks a particular step on their own creative journey, which might
be work that they found liberating to do, or because it represents a style of
working that they gradually found out about and discovered, or it might be a
picture the making of which changed their way of approaching life-drawing. The
work on show might mark a surprise on a learner’s path to move forward with
life-drawing, an unexpected success or a hard-fought for personal achievement
that they still might have some doubts about. Or, the work might just have been
fun to do, or the result pleasing to the eye.
It's always great to see artwork that you have made yourself hang
in an exhibition. The display puts your work at a distance to the moments of
its making and always will make you look at it anew. Seeing your work in a
frame creates this positive distance to it, also seeing it hang on a wall,
framed or not. It’s also interesting to see how your work hangs with other
people’s work, because artworks interact with each other and this will often
bring about new ‘meanings’. When we talk about ‘meanings’ in our artwork it is
the feelings that it creates in us when we make it – the making process is so
important, that’s why a lot of learners come to the classes – and the feelings a
viewer might have when looking at it.
We discuss in our classes a lot about the doubts that we have in our
artmaking process, expectations we have, worries, and of course the joys too.
It is so important to be able to share this with other learners. An exhibition
like this one is another possibility to see our work, stand together in front
of it, discuss it again, and see what new impressions we get from seeing it in
a different context.
The work on show did not have to pass a certain ‘quality mark’. In fact,
this is absolutely not what this show is about. It is about sharing with others
about your path of working. Sharing the joy of being creative in the ‘safe’
company of others and about encouraging the show’s viewers to consider doing
some creative work if that is something they don’t already do.
‘Level of skill’, ‘talent’, ‘level of accomplishment’ are terms
that don’t capture really what our main focus is when we do such creative work,
but rather discovering one’s own personal interests in drawing and painting the
figure, trying out new ways of working that you thought did not exist (rather
than produce ‘market-worthy’, ‘sell-able’ artwork), and being inspired by other
learners’ work to try out something similar.” Sabine Kussmaul, Art teacher
In our Life Drawing courses (Monday nights and Thursday afternoons) and in our
Saturday life-drawing events, we try out many different ways of using drawing
as an expressive tool to document our individual observations. We work with
pencils, ink, charcoal, and combine line work with colour – watercolour and
acrylics.
